POP MUSIC

POP MUSIC; Pop Turns the Tables -- With Beefcake

By PETER WATROUS

Published: February 10, 1991

So what happened to all the fat guys and wimps in pop music? You used to see herds of them at concerts and on MTV, playing their guitars, surrounded by gorgeous women. Guzzling beer and wearing black T-shirts stretched to the limit, they gave the male audience just the right reinforcement.

But the golden age is over; the beer esthetic is gone. Across the cultural board, from movies to advertisements, men have become not just erotic figures, but really erotic figures, and in pop they're not wearing too many clothes. Whether it's Jon Bon Jovi, M. C. Hammer, Vanilla Ice, L. L. Cool J, Bobby Brown, Faith No More, the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Danzig, athleticism has taken over and shirts have been taken off. Drill-sergeant exercise routines and exposed torsos have become the real subject of shows.

Men in pop are getting the treatment that used to be reserved for women -- tight clothes, obsessional camera angles, fetishization. The choice is simple: Nautilus or banishment to the nether world of marginal success.

The new attention to skin is all about making performers mythic, creating a gap between the ordinary audience and the glamorous, inaccessible stars. Over the years, pop music has always swung between the romantic and the everyday, between the glamour of Madonna and the anti-glamour of, say, Dire Straits, an earnest rock band playing for the sake of music. With the rise of punk in the late 1970's, which ostensibly democratized popular music, rock and pop were shorn of their glamour.

Not until the creation of MTV in 1981 did a Hollywood sensibility enter the world of music. With MTV came the same sort of elevation experienced by film stars. And like film celebrities, who are reshaped and implanted, pop personalities are now under pressure to correct their physical appearances to fit current notions of what is acceptable. The out-of-shapers didn't have a chance. In the last half of the 80's, audiences wanted glamour, not democracy.

Today, men are using their bodies to storm a position formerly occupied by women. Not that sexuality hasn't always been a selling point for men in music, from Duke Ellington to Frank Sinatra, from Elvis Presley to Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison to Marvin Gaye. But the athletic male body, usually shirtless and well displayed in concerts and videos, is now standard among superstars. Where women were once the focus of an audience's unresolved desire, now men have joined the action.

It's no coincidence that beefcake arrived after the rise of a generation of women performers like Janet Jackson, Madonna and the now-forgotten Cyndi Lauper. They and others have given the impression that they controlled their own eroticism, that they have been exploiting themselves instead of being exploited. The use of the body has become less a sign of subservience than an emblem of empowerment. Feminism, in its attempt to give decision-making powers to the exploited, inadvertently allowed for a whole new type of commerciality.

Male performers have taken their cue. Made aware of an affluent market -- as demonstrated by the incredible popularity of New Kids on the Block -- they found that teen-age girls were more than willing to buy images of the new beefcake. Add that discovery to the gym culture in the 1980's, and the death of the fat rock star became inevitable.

Blame the fashion industry, too. Along with Madison Avenue, it has had a huge influence on the making of videos and the way images -- and bodies -- are constructed. For example, Janet Jackson's video for "Love Will Never Do," directed by Herb Ritts, features two studs running around in a desert without shirts. One man is bald (this is a theme: there's a bald, shirtless man in Cathy Dennis's video of her hit "Just Another Dream"); the video couldn't have been made without some knowledge of the photographers Helmut Newton and Robert Mapple thorpe.

With its iconography of unresolved desire -- little touching goes on, and Ms. Jackson spends more time caressing herself than being caressed -- the video comes straight from a fashion magazine's understanding that unsatiated desire and consumerism are similar. In a time when sexuality is perceived as dangerous, the body has become the focus of fantasy, made all that much more appealing by its lack of availability.

So the on-stage body must now be perfect or the artist risks commercial failure; the use of Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan as front bodies for Milli Vanilli and a model stand-in for Martha Wash on the video and in performances of Black Box's hit "Everybody Everybody" shows how essential eroticism is to selling pop. Eroticism, for years the province of pop music, is based on denial, and if an audience doesn't want something, it can't be denied.

Rock's traditional image of self-destruction is also used as a sales ploy. Many bands today have adopted the traditional romantic image of the artist as victim or outcast. A group like the Black Crowes relishes a certain emaciated look that suggests a sense of danger. That skinniness has to be shown: in concert, the band's lead singer, Chris Robinson, lets the loose blouse he is wearing slip to show some skin; in the video for their latest hit, "Hard to Handle," there are plenty of shirts open to the waist and shots of Mr. Robinson without any shirt at all, showing off a skinny but well-muscled body. Fifteen years ago, he would have just been skinny; now he's also well defined.

Where the Black Crowes present an illusion of decadence through emaciation and take off their shirts to show it, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Urban Dance Squad -- two bands that depict an idealized California -- remove their shirts as an argument for fun in the sun with the boys. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, a Los Angeles group, strip to their shorts in concert, showing off perfectly formed surfer bodies. In a video for "Deeper Shade of Soul" by Urban Dance Squad, a European group, men in shorts spend their day in the sun, skateboarding around a pool. Oddly, the look skips a generation of confessional California-based, fully clad songwriter types (Jackson Browne, Don Henley and Randy Newman) and instead links up with the California of the Beach Boys, the Ventures and "Beach Blanket Bingo."

Final scenes of "Deeper Shade of Soul" show band members' stomachs, tightly muscled; women in the video are rare. Both bands are advertisements for the good life in California, where boys can do what boys do, which is play music and skateboard. Clearly this is a closed world that posits a type of joy and community without female interruption.

In the world of male pop, the element of shock also helps in constructing an image. From its beginnings in Elvis or Little Richard all the way through Madonna, rock has invested a great deal of energy in cultivating outrage: like sex, it sells. As sexuality became standard in the 1970's, pop music looked around to find something to generate a sense of transgression.

So Madonna turned sexuality into self-assertion, and fiddled around with religion to appear as if she were breaking a taboo. But men always had self-assertion in their arsenal; it was neither novelty nor transgressional. Until now, few men in rock felt a need to hone their bodies into the ideal expected of women.

Today, audiences clearly love the mythification of modern pop: Bobby Brown, who can't sing to save his life, has an audience, mostly female and mostly young, that goes crazy for him in concert. Critics bemoan the loss of musical values in pop music, but audiences don't. They want the spectacle, the explosions and the glory.

As any M. C. Hammer video hints, the excessive athletic control of a body can seem militaristic, a sign of power and force. The perfect male body, glorified and venerated, ends up representing discipline instead of freedom and may just be a symbol for these bellicose, male-dominated times.

THE MALE ANIMAL, ANDROGYNY TO MUSCLE

How pop musicians want to be perceived has changed dramatically over the years, following the topography of larger pop culture itself. Whether by androgyny, emaciation or muscles, performers are deemed attractive by being different. Here's a look at the image of the male superstar over the years.

1950's: That Elvis Presley is a cultural icon is obvious. He introduced to a wider, white audience a form of show-business sexuality that had been common among black artists; with a few hip shakes, he changed what was permissible in the mainstream. Less obvious is the effect Little Richard, the self-proclaimed "Queen of Rock," had on the American public. One of the richer film clips in pop history shows Richard, heavily made up, mobbed by young white women. In the 50's, unclear sexuality might have been more approachable than real sexuality; the young women might have felt protected by the color barrier as well.

1960's: Studs of this decade -- Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger and Jimi Hendrix -- took different forms, in contrast to anti-studs like Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead or the Crosby, Stills and Nash axis. Morrison and Jagger cultivated a forbidden attraction. Hendrix was obsessed, charismatic, plain good looking and a sign of the Other.

1970's: Thinness and sexual ambiguity glamorized pop. Androgynous performers like David Bowie and Iggy Pop, who also showed some skin, were balanced by the respectable pop star -- James Taylor, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.

1980's: Enter Michael Jackson at full, strange force, the embodiment of compressed and contorted sexuality. Androgynous and childlike, he called for help. But the late 1980's saw the rise of stars like Bobby Brown, willing to strip and proclaim their masculinity.